Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Aluminium Keyboard support under X11: all models, all OSes

I finally found the time to update my previous support for Aluminium Keyboard under Xorg, and take it to the Next Level (tm). The overall support is now much more polished. For you this means several things:

I've implemented the XKB geometries of all variants of the long Aluminium Keyboard, be it ANSI (American), ISO (Internationnal) or JIS (Japanese)! And believe me, it's darned complicated to support JIS keyboard's dual layout without having access to the real hardware :D

I've added support for base XKB rules, which means that the keyboard will now be properly configured on other OSes than Linux. I personally used OpenSolaris during my tests, but it should work equally well on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and all their cousins!

The keyboard support is now aware of the system-wide keyboard settings as found in Debian or Fedora for example. If you configured your system to default to Dvorak layout, the support will use it automatically!

Installing the new support

I'm short on details, but you can find a complete explanation for all these steps in a previous post.

XKB Patch

First of all, download this XKB patch and try to apply it on your XKB install in dry-run. For the sake of the example, I assume you downloaded the patch in your $HOME directory.

If the patch applies successfuly, you can proceed and apply it for real:

gunzip -cd $HOME/applekbd-xkb-support.patch.gz | patch -p1

HAL support

Well, even if HAL is meant to be replaced sooner or later by DeviceKit, that's the way to go for the time being. So I reworked the previous HAL support and split it in one fdi file to track your keyboard on your hardware, plus a script to configure XKB for Aluminium Keyboard and to remap the Fn key to Insert. To install it, first remove the fdi file from the previous support if necessary. Then, copy this new fdi file (which you have previously downloaded in your $HOME directory) in the relevant HAL directory. On my Ubuntu Karmic, this gives (update: added missing chmod, thanks Patrick):

Download (I assume in your $HOME directory) the new script for XKB setting, plus its associated configuration file. Then copy them respectively in HAL's installation directory and in the system-wide configuration directory. On my Ubuntu, ths gives:

You can tweak the configuration file /etc/default/applekbd-xkb-settings to enable the settings you want for your keyboard. By default, the Fn key is remapped to Insert. The XKB options can be configured there for system-wide setting, as explained in the configuration file itself. But it's more user-friendly to configure XKB in your preferred Desktop Environment (GNOME, KDE, XFCE... whatever).

Enjoy!

I'm particularly happy with my revised XKB geometries. A tedious work, but this time keys dimension and layout perfectly match the original hardware, whatever the model. I'm even more happy now that I discovered how Apple decided to implement their EISU and KANA keys on the JIS keyboard! If you are curious, have a look at file xkb/keycodes/machintosh in the patch, or read this post on Parallels' forum.

The XKB patches are now ready for submission to the Xorg people (xkeyboard-config). The rest of the files are also clean enough to start providing .deb packages for this support! Maybe a good opportunity of learning PPA in LaunchPad :P